Ghettoside by Jill Leovy

Ghettoside by Jill Leovy is part anthropological ethnography of a homicide in a police station in Los Angeles and part true crime narrative of the murder of a young man.  The writing is superb, the story is fascinating, and yet I'm left with a feeling that I'm somehow dirty and complicit after having read it.

Leovy was a journalist who kept a blog about the homicide rates in LA for years. When that project ended, she embedded herself with a homicide unit and the results of all these experiences was this book. The premise is that while violent crime and homicide are declining nationally, black homicide rates remain stubbornly high and black on black homicide is the majority of that.  And the "clearance rate" - the rate at which cases are solved and closed - for black homicide cases is abysmally low.

Leovy tries to untangle the mess of inner-city violence. Poverty. Gangs. Unemployment. Schools. Policing.  Vigilante justice. Where do you start to address this problem?

Leovy starts by putting faces to statistics. She introduces us to a young man who is shot and killed. It turns out he's the son of a homicide detective. We follow the case through as it gets solved and goes to trial.  By giving us the full backstory of one single case, she humanizes it.  When she lists a dozen people in a row who have been killed, it can become monotonous and rote, but when you think about how each of those murdered people has family, friends, and community behind them, it becomes dreadfully uncomfortable reading.

There's something vaguely off about the whole thing. Leovy desperately tries not to fall back on racist tropes ("there's just something wrong with them"), but spends exactly one page talking about how integration and financial stability could help this problem. She spends much more time talking about how "proactive" methods of policing - pulling people over because you suspect they have committed a minor infraction in the hopes of getting evidence for a larger crime - do no good when the larger crimes are not being solved. As I learned in college in a philosophy class that forever changed my life, the certainty of the punishment is a more important deterrent to crime than the severity of the punishment. And if these homicides are rarely punished, they will continue on. I don't actually think the answer is policing and maybe that's why I'm so uncomfortable with this book. 

The answer has to be about integration. I maintain that most social ills come down to infrastructure and housing (if any of my students ever stumbled upon this, they would say "amen").  If all people had access to safe, clean homes with appropriate transportation to jobs and/or schools and we weren't all separated into our little enclaves of race and class, things would be better for all of us. I practice what I preach. I live in a mixed use neighborhood (while we have a single-family home and one of our neighbors is, too, we also live across the street from an apartment building and next door to a rental property that is a duplex) and vote in people who talk about sewers, electrical grids, and water safety no matter what their political party. 

And the police? The police can adopt whatever strategy they want once my dream world of integration comes true.